Seattle (KONP staff) – A Burien, Washington, seafood broker pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court in Seattle to smuggling geoducks.
52-year-old Jeffrey Olsen, owner of Absolute Seafoods, admitted he falsified documents and lied to authorities about disposing of 46 cases of potentially tainted geoduck from Alaska.
Court documents say Olsen purchased geoduck from various Alaska divers in 2019 to be trucked to Vancouver B.C and then shipped to Hong Kong. But one day after the purchase, one of the divers notified Alaska state officials that he had mistakenly harvested his geoduck from an area that had not been approved for harvest. That area had not been tested for paralytic shellfish poisoning.
Alaska officials notified Olsen that he needed to destroy the shipment as it was unsafe to consume, but because the illegally harvested geoduck had been mixed in with the legal clams, Olsen was told the entire shipment had to be destroyed. Olsen instead filed phony paperwork and sold the clams anyway.